


This Tuesday

by softcorescorn



Category: Original Work
Genre: Sneezing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-09
Updated: 2018-02-09
Packaged: 2019-03-15 16:26:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,496
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13617156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/softcorescorn/pseuds/softcorescorn
Summary: Prompt-meme from May 2017.





	This Tuesday

The woods haven’t started feeling real to me, and I’m not sure they ever will.  
  
Every Tuesday, whizzing by the last few pylons and trail markers into the depths of the forest, I feel like I could stop peddling at any moment and fairies would whisk me along the rest of the way.  
  
I shut one eye against the sunlight beating down in speckled bursts as the canopy thinned out. This wasn’t a real place. It was a work of fiction– the setting of an animated movie where tourists were shuffled off by goblins never to be seen or heard from again. This was a threat told to kids who could still be scared out of exploring because they happened to be born in a time before witchcraft and moving pictures were separate concepts.  
  
I related to them, really. I’d never left the city before my apprenticeship began, and even though I’d been skidding through the dirt on my shitty street bike once a week for a few months now, I still found it hard to believe that anywhere on earth really looked like this. Plunged into perpetual springtime.  
  
The darkness of the woods burst open into bright sea air. I squinted against the sinking sun, just like I had last Tuesday and the one before that. Gulls shrieked a slow circuit overhead and I saw it, standing stark and dull against the hillside: a grey, sagging echo of a building, looking for all the world like the last piece of a toy town long-forgotten on the top shelf of an antique store.  
  
The building probably should have been–  _would_  have been a historical landmark if anyone bothered to come out here anymore. Kids who believed the devil lived in the woods used to learn the alphabet here. I felt all the hair on my arms stand out against the damp country air and I wasn’t sure if I disagreed with them.  
  
The flimsy frame of my bike rattled the rest of the way up the patchy brick walkway to the schoolhouse. The turbulence of the crumbling path was becoming part of the routine, but the deep crunch under my tires was something new. I peered over the handlebars to see, scattered at the corners of the walkway, hailstones. Piled opulent like an assembly of every pearl too ugly to grow up to be a necklace.  
  
I dumped my bike in a twisted heap and hopped up the stairs, consciously rearranging my posture, missing the industrial white noise that should have been propping me up, drowning out my own pulse in my ears.  
  
This building tended to attract conflicting weather patterns. Sometimes it was hailstones in the yard on a cloudless day, sometimes it was an infant storm cloud crackling tinny thunderclaps in your face over the breakfast table. Cold pockets in the woods beyond. Cold pockets everywhere.  
  
I didn’t like to think about the environmental repercussions of all this. Somehow, losing my apprenticeship always struck me as a worse fate than losing my principles, so I never asked those questions. Just creaked open the crooked front door with the same lump in my throat as last Tuesday and the one before that.  
  
I let the door bang behind me and peered past the makeshift foyer, into the open former-classroom. It was a surprisingly wide space– a sprawling room of warped wooden floorboards that sunk just a few shallow steps below the main entryway. Stripped of the ghosts of old classroom accoutrements, the only furniture that remained was a heavy, oak desk at at the far corner of the room.  
  
The blackboard was intact, too. Now, completely covered in what looked at first glance like a bloom of paisley that had begun to creep away, lichenous, spilling off the board itself onto the surrounding walls and floor.  
  
A second glance revealed that it was a murky rainbow of symbols– mysterious letters and sigils winding in and out of each other, weaving into a sort of circuitry scrawled across every available surface. Crisp in some places, blurred in others. Lines hastily scrubbed out with a shirt sleeve, redrawn and reconnected a dozen different ways. A multicolored web that looked as if a giant technicolor spider had spun it.  
  
A step echoed in the bare room. Standing only a few feet back from the blackboard: the spider himself.  
  
If you stayed long enough for a third glance, the web seemed to seeth and boil. Maybe it was just a trick of the eye– the mess of colors, combined with the afternoon sun beating life into the ever-present miasma of chalk dust and salt until it felt solid as a heavy spectre hanging around the room. But looking at it for too long always made me feel ill at ease. It was a kind of nausea that struck you at the base of your skull, like you were a kid trying to solve a cereal box maze on a long car ride, but you had to set it down and close your eyes before you could figure it out.  
  
I wondered if he felt it, too, when he stared into that thing for so long.  
  
I ducked under a row of dusty herbs that lined the ceiling and took the two shallow steps into the room slowly. It wasn’t uncommon for him to get tangled up in his own projects while I finished mine, but he always greeted me with a warm but far-off smile and prompt instructions when I walked in. This time, only silence, broken occasionally by the dull, meticulous scrape of chalk on slate.  
  
I waited. He simply stared at the circuit, his expression growing darker, more intense the longer he looked. Frosty panic piled up heavy as hailstones my stomach as his breath quickened and his eyes welled with tears. He took a few urgent steps board, nearly stumbling as the heel of his boot caught on one of the warped floorboards. I froze at the foot of the steps. What had gone wrong?  
  
In the same instant that I was about to call out, he clasped a hand over his face and sneezed.  
  
“ _eht– **ISSH**_ **uh** …  _ih_ g’ _SCHH_ uh…!”  
  
Twice.  
  
Hard enough to curl him at the waist and send a tremor through his whole body. The chalk slipped from his grip and skittered across the floor.  
  
He turned back to address me finally, but only managed about half a wavering syllable and the quickest curl of a smile before he shook his head and twisted away helplessly.  
  
“–  _ng’ **TSSHH’**_ **uhh**!”  
  
A third sneeze rang out in the bare room. His voice slipped off into a sigh at the tail end of it, like he’d been needing it for days. I watched him closely for another moment, finding my voice only after he’d straightened back up to full height and turned to face me, still blinking away irritated tears with an uncharacteristic sheepishness.  
  
“Bless you.” God, was that all? I found my legs at last and made my way across the rest of the room, exasperated. Maybe I was suffering from newcomers’ nerves or maybe I was being reasonably cautious, but I certainly felt stupid jumping out of my skin over a sneeze.  
  
He thumbed the tip of his nose twice, emerged from his reverie and grinned– lit up, practically– like I’d just conjured up a fond memory, somehow. “Thank you,” he said earnestly. He clapped his hands together in a shower of particulate color, coughed into his sleeve, and bent to retrieve the chalk.  
  
It  _was_  in my nature to ask if he was feeling alright, but I hadn’t quite learned how to ask questions in this place yet. Asking someone who could call up wildfire and hurricanes about something so ordinary felt improper, somehow. Insulting, maybe. Intimate, perhaps.  
  
I tugged at one of the windows, eventually persuading it to open in a few lurching motions. I wasn’t sure if this was going to help or hinder his situation, but his– our?– workspace was in such a perpetual state of dust and disarray that I figured the fresh air would do at least one of us some good. I noticed a little pile of hail that had collected in what remained of the window box outside.   
  
“By the way–” I said, plucking a fat, frozen drop from the corner and holding it up between thumb and forefinger, “there’s hail out there. Are they yours?”  
  
He blinked, still sniffling wearily behind his shirt sleeve. “Not this time,” he said, and swept out of the room, adding without a second glance at me, “Your assignment’s on the desk,” before disappearing out of sight. I heard him blow his nose softly behind a closed door a few moments later.  
  
The surface of the desk had been swept completely clean except for a bleached-white tortoise shell and hardly enough beeswax to make a birthday candle.  
  
God, maybe today was the day I’d learn to ask questions. 


End file.
